Problems installing using ODE and wininet.dll/urlmon.dll

Problems installing using ODE and wininet.dll/urlmon.dll

If you are using the Office 97 Developers' Edition to create a runtime install for your application, then you need to be aware of a bug, caused by different versions of Internet Explorer being installed on the target PC. This manifests itself with the error mesage "Setup could not write to the file: ' C:\Windows\System \Wininet.dll'. This file is currently being used by another application. Close any open applications." even though no other applications may be running.

Microsoft have confirmed that this is a bug in article Q201357, but only mentioned this problem between Internet Explorer 4 and 3. I have just encountered the same problem with developing on a system that has IE 5.5, and trying to deploy to a machine that has IE 4.0 on.

There are several fixes, but the one that I think is easiest is to open the admin.inf and setup.inf files that are created by the Package and Deployment Wizard, and modify each line that mentions either wininet.dll or urlmon to something like:

"urlmon_dll" = 1,URLMON.DLL,,,,,,1033,NEVER,,,,,,SHARED,456464,,,,5.50.4701.2400,

from

"urlmon_dll" = 1,URLMON.DLL,,,,,,1033,OLDER,,,,,,SHARED,456464,,,,5.50.4701.2400,

This will prevent the two DLL files from being updated on the target computer. Apparently, telling the user that they can press 'Ignore' when installing the application allows the installation to go ahead successfully, but that just doesn't look professional.

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Last modified at 06/06/2006 14:58:06